Recently in Class Category

Regular readers will have noticed that in recent months, Feministing has brought in a number of new contributors: Ariel, Jos, Lori, Rose and myself. No doubt you're getting to know them by reading their posts and engaging with their ideas in the comments section, but I also suspect that you might want to know a little more about these wonderful women (I know I do!). Over the last few weeks, I've been interviewing my fellow new contributors so that you and I can get to know them a little better. This week I interviewed Lori Adelman.

Lori grew up in New Jersey and went to Harvard, where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in Social Studies. In college, she was active in student government and in the Association of Black College Women's political branch. She got her start in feminist work in the Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and at the Abortion Access Project. Now, she works at the International Women's Health Coalition in the communications department, where she blogs for IWHC's blog Akimbo. Lori lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog, Wordsworth, who she describes as a dog of the "presidential variety": an adorable, brilliant, accomplished mutt.

While I and the rest of the world mourn the death of Patrick Swayze, I hope the death of another amazing and important figure in American history doesn't slip through the cracks. Today the AP is reporting the death of Crystal Lee Sutton, labor organizer and activist for the working class, whose story of fighting to unionize textile plants in the South was depicted in the film "Norma Rae."

From the AP:

In 1973, Sutton was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at J.P. Stevens when a manager fired her for pro-union activity.

In a final act of defiance before police hauled her out, Sutton, who had worked at the plant for 16 years, wrote "UNION" on a piece of cardboard and climbed onto a table on the plant floor. Other employees responded by shutting down their machines.

Even though Sally Field won a best-actress Academy Award for playing the character inspired by Ms. Sutton, the AP reports today that she never made much profit off the movie. I wonder if that was because the film execs didn't give her her fair due, or because she was too much "of the people" to get rich from the story. Or some other unknown reason.

Either way, she is completely bad-ass and her work is inspirational to me. As a female labor organizer in the 70's fighting against low pay and poor working conditions for "ordinary people," both black and white, she was certainly a trailblazer.

May she rest in peace.

The New York Times reported last week on a study that shows low-wage workers are cheated out of pay and workers' compensation at staggering rates. According to the study, "68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week."

Wage-law violations disproportionately impact people who experience discrimination based on other categories in addition to class:

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis responded to the study:

"There is no excuse for the disregard of federal labor standards -- especially those designed to protect the neediest among us." Ms. Solis said she was in the process of hiring 250 more wage-and-hour investigators. "Today's report clearly shows we still have a major task before us," she said.

Secretary Solis is a longtime supporter of labor. Hopefully having an advocate in a position of power will prove beneficial here and she will be able to use this study as a reason to combat unfair employment practices.

Check out Courtney's thoughtful column in the American Prospect about Ted Kennedy's severe missteps and great achievements, and questions how (or if) we can measure the two. A snippet:

Kennedy never, in fact, expected perfection from others. Instead, he made cross-party alliances based on a belief that political life is not Camelot but Red Rover. He became, in many ways, the antithesis of the Kennedy hype. He became a man with a truly problematic past and a deep commitment to contributing to the nation nonetheless. As Kay Steiger writes at Jezebel, "Sometimes it's difficult to examine the whole life of a public figure. After all, public figures are human, and humans can't be perfect. Sometimes, they don't even come close."

Also read Dana's post on Kennedy's legacy on abortion and disability rights, which discusses his capacity to maintain his pro-choice beliefs alongside with his passion for disability rights. She says it well, "Only Ted Kennedy could bring NARAL to the table with Sam Brownback." Make sure to check it out.

Danah Boyd gave a thoroughly thought-provoking presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum this week about how the politics of class play out online -- and thoroughly debunked the idea that the Internet is a Utopian paradise in which we are "all equal."

To get specific, Boyd looks at the divide between Facebook and MySpace users. She quotes Kat, a 14-year-old from Massachusetts:

"I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all... not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature."

That's right, a "ghetto." Boyd goes on to note that teenagers from wealthier backgrounds are more comfortable engaging in "adult" environments than teenagers from poorer backgrounds -- hence wealthier teens are probably more likely to favor the "mature" social networking site, Facebook. And here's the part where I am just going to quote from Boyd's analysis extensively, because she is so freakin' smart:

The fact [is] that MySpace is still quite popular among a certain segment of the population. Only a month ago, I was doing fieldwork in Atlanta where I found heavy usage of MySpace among certain groups of youth. They knew of Facebook but had no interest in leaving MySpace to join Facebook.

Herein lies the reality that makes all of this quite messy to deal with. It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.

This dynamic was furthered by the press, an institution that stems from privilege and tends to reflect the lives of a more privileged class of people. They narrated MySpace as the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior. And here we get back to Kat's point: MySpace has become the "ghetto" of the digital landscape. The people there are more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society. And many of us have habitually crossed the street to avoid what is seen as the riff-raff.

The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to "help" those who are not well-off. Here is where a privilege-check is necessary. How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens. They are certainly speaking in a manner that reveals distrust and condescension.

The NY Times writes last week about marriage, infidelity and Mark Sanford,

Despite strong social riptides working against it -- the liberalization of divorce laws, the vanishing stigma of divorce, the continual online temptations of social sites like MySpace or Facebook -- the marriage bond is far stronger in 21st-century America than many may assume. Infidelity is one of the most common reasons cited by people who divorce. But surveys find the majority of people who discover a cheating spouse remain married to that person for years afterward. Many millions more shrug off, or work through, strong suspicions or evidence of infidelity. And recent trends in marriage suggest that the institution itself has become more resilient in recent years, not less so.

The article looks at statistics and finds that since more people are staying married, despite the temptations to get divorced or cheat, marriage is working. It ignores one key fact, that perhaps less people are actually getting married, but more often just live together. The article does acknowledge that since people get married older, they are more clear about what they want and are better equipped at "making it work."

Firstly, if it is true, that people stay together after infidelity, looking at examples of public officials is not a good gauge of this since public couples have more at stake to stay together and not be destroyed by the public eye and the news media. They want to make an example of how they can overcome obstacle in their relationships, even if it is at great personal cost.

Secondly, if people are staying together despite infidelity, it could be for a variety of reasons. One, the pressure of marriage, culturally and financially doesn't allow for all the transgressions we think our "free" society allows and second, our view of monogamy has shifted and we can accept when someone falls off the path of heteronormative monogamy. I am sure there are more open marriages now than there were say 30 years ago.

But that doesn't change the main argument in the article which is really about how marriage is a resilient social institution. And I think it is safe to say the fact that marriage has become a booming industry, increasing cultural norm in almost retrograde terms and the government's re-commitment to keep it between a man and a woman are not innocent players in this supposed resiliency. So I guess the question is, has anything really changed? Has feminism helped at all in helping women not buy into the industry of marriage?

Well, interestingly, it seems that feminism is part of what is keeping marriage working.

Some of the same social changes that have unsettled traditional 1950s-era marriages have seemingly deepened them in the 1990s and 2000s. Today women are contributing more financially to relationships than earlier generations, and men are contributing more to the domestic duties. Compared with earlier generations, men and women today are more likely to marry someone like themselves, with a similar educational background, experts say. The relationship is less about dividing economic and domestic duties and more about shared interests and mutual happiness.

That is something I can buy, but I still take issue with the "who" of these articles. Only a handful of my friends are actually getting married. Many of them may want to, but many of them are having kids without husbands and they are not getting married. Some because they don't want to, or they haven't found someone to marry or they don't have access to the means to have a wedding. I am over studies that are just about how middle class people stay married and cheat or do not cheat. What are the relationship habits of people that don't marry, that try alternatives, that don't have social access to marriage (the queer community, poor people, etc), what are they doing? Their behavior will tell us much more about the institution of marriage than just looking at statistics of how many people are staying married.

My name is Courtney Martin and I'm a gentrifier.

Like so many young, urban writerly types, I live in a neighborhood that is predominantly and historically composed of folks very unlike myself. I'm white, they're West Indian. I'm a writer, they mostly hold traditional jobs (my neighbor Mary is a nurse, my other neighbor is a security guard etc.). In my building, I'm young, they're mostly 40+. I'm agnostic, they're more likely to be religious.

I've long been fascinated by issues of gentrification--intellectually--but also trying to understand my own roles and responsibilities when it comes to gentrification--practically speaking. People throw the word around, pay it lipservice from time to time, but rarely do we really untangle all the issues. I think it's especially egregious among progressives, like myself, who want think that we're not the "bad gentrifiers" because we care about the original culture of the neighborhood and try not to be too snotty about wanting a coffee shop with wireless or whatever. But you know what? Chances are, that if you pay rent or a mortgage in a neighborhood that has historically been inhabited by folks who look and live a lot differently than you do, especially if that rent or mortgage seems like a steal to you and raises the bar for everyone else, you're a gentrifier. Face facts and then figure out how to deal with it. (I'm still in this process, of course.)

I recently read this amazing article about one aspect of this issue--the social interactions. From the Brooklyn Rail:

I'm an urban planner. As part of my job with MIT's Community Innovators Lab, I spent four months interviewing residents of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill neighborhoods with the goal of understanding what gentrification means for the longstanding community, at a time when that community is being threatened by swanky glass-faced co-op buildings and hordes of new residents fleeing high Manhattan rents.

I re-listened to hours of audio recordings and found what I knew was already there: tape after tape of Bed-Stuy stalwarts lamenting that the new people moving into their neighborhood, specifically the new Caucasian people, were un-friendly. My interviews revealed that the arriving gentry didn't say hello on the sidewalk, didn't hold doors open, and didn't try to meet their neighbors.

She goes on to detail some of the interviews, and then analyzes gentrification in a historic context:

Gentrification is a re-shuffling. It's part of a relentless American history of moving populations en masse from one location to another when their presence becomes inconvenient. This country moved Native Americans out, and brought slaves in. In more recent history, it drew middle class people to the suburbs, and redlined African Americans into urban ghettos. It tore down and displaced whole neighborhoods with Urban Renewal in the 1950s and 60s. Hope VI, the most recent iteration in American housing policy, was meant to build mixed-income communities, but in practice displaced thousands of low-income people from functional homes and neighborhoods. Gentrification, in many ways, feels like a new name for an old game. At least we now have a multi-racial gentry class.

And one of the positive perspectives on such an often ugly and difficult phenomenon:

In my twenty interviews, one wish came through stronger than friendliness. People want diverse neighborhoods, including different races, ages, and sexual orientations, with an array of careers, representing different socioeconomic classes. Brooklyn native Tyrone Harris said, "The diversity in the neighborhood is so good, that we can learn about the whole world in just one neighborhood, because we have Chinese, African American, Latino, and White. We have everything here. Puerto Rican, Spanish--you name it, we got it. But the thing is, are we using our assets? Or are we just sitting back saying, 'We don't like this or we don't like that.' See, it's easy to complain, but the question is: What do you want to do?"

A really important question. Anybody have ideas of how those of us in gentrifying neighborhoods--both folks who have lived "here" forever and those who are just moving in--can collectively benefit from our assets?

I've developed good relationships with my neighbors; Mary visits me with her amazing birds and is generous enough to take my packages. I thank her with candles and free books. She never minds when Nik plays Rockband late at night. And this, I think, actually matters a lot...as small as it all may sound.

But beyond that, I'm hungry to interact with those in my community in a way that feeds us all.

Thanks to Ramin for the heads up.

Taxes! Don't know about you, but just seeing the word "taxes" can bring full-on panic. This week, President Obama announced part of his new tax code plan. I decided to get some help understanding it all from tax professor Annette Nellen, director of the Master's taxation program at San Jose State University.

Hope this helps! Here's Annette...

There are so many incredible people doing activism these days about climate change. I'm especially excited about those acting at the intersections of racism, classism, health issues, and the environment, like Van Jones and Majora Carter. Check out this great video profile of Kari Fulton, Brower youth Award Winner and general badass.

Knowing that Kari and so many others like her exist make me feel safer and happier. I can almost imagine this huge generation of new, savvy environmental activists coming up under folks like Majora and Van. Wahoooo!

And don't miss out on other great video profiles over at the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.

Last weekend's post was my attempt to help readers, if they were having a hard time like I felt most folks were, understand what was going on with AIG, bonuses and bailout money. This weekend's post is my attempt to help folks better understand what's going on with the auto industry and the auto bailout plans.

Susan Helper is AT&T Professor of Economics at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. Here's Susan...

Need help understanding what's going on with AIG, bailout money and the big picture issues behind the financial crisis? Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, helps break it down.

Here's Sarah...

Via Chicago Tribune:

Faced with mounting unpaid lunch charges, Albuquerque Public Schools last month instituted a "cheese sandwich policy," serving a cold cheese sandwich, fruit and a milk carton to children whose parents are supposed to pay for some or all of their regular meals but fail to pick up the tab.

There is a lot that is troubling about this policy, but the main thing is the idea of making kids suffer because of their parents financial situations. Not only would this policy have a nutritional affect on the kids (since they don't get the variety offered by the hot lunch options) it also has a shaming affect, singling them out and making it clear to their peers that they are poor.

Tactics like this are becoming necessary in a worsening financial environment but it's sad to see that low-income children are the first to suffer.

What do you all think?

There's been lots of talk about clean coal these days. Have you seen any of the industry's commercials? But what you haven't heard much about since Robert F. Kennedy visited the region back in the day is where coal comes from -- the Appalachian Mountains. His son continues to speak out about the region. Ashley Judd a long with many folks in her home state of Kentucky have been doing a lot of activism around mining and the disparities in the Appalachian Mountains there. Judd recently spoke out about a piece Diana Sawyer aired on 20/20 last week called "Children of the Mountains on Appalachian life in Kentucky -- Diane Sawyer is also from the state. The piece sparked some reaction in the blogosphere from folks who have been in the trenches working on these disparities just about their whole lives.

I decided to ask Theresa L. Burriss, the Assistant Professor of English & Appalachian Studies at Radford University, about everyday life in Appalachia and what she thought about clean coal and Diane Sawyer's piece. (Diane Sawyer did a follow-up piece last night on "Mountain Dew mouth".)

Here's Theresa...

Rachel at Women's Health News brings our attention to this proposed bill in Tennessee that would target certain pregnant women for drug and alcohol testing.

(c) The department, in promulgating rules to implement this act, shall consider the following as indications of the necessity for alcohol or drug testing: (1) No prenatal care; (2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation; (3) Incomplete prenatal care; (4) Abruptio placentae; (5) Intrauterine fetal death; (6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause; (7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause; (8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or (9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

As Rachel explains in comments, the bill's regulations would target low-income women, "the women who may not have health insurance or time off work or money or transportation to get prenatal care, who are going to have those same barriers to going through drug rehabilitation."

Of course, tactics like this regarding pregnant women is nothing new. In fact, it's a trend.

Aunt B. says it best:

In other words, the precedent they're setting is that, once you are pregnant, your body is not your own. You no longer know what's best for you. Your doctor no longer knows what's best for you. You are not allowed to not realize you're pregnant. You're not allowed to be afraid. You're not allowed to be too poor to go to the doctor. You have to do what the State tells you to do while you're pregnant, because, while you're pregnant, your body is not your own.

(Mamapundit has more, as well.)

For more information on pregnant women's rights, check out the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

As many of you are probably aware, I got a lot of shit for my post last week on what a day in my life looks like. Many people, both in comments and on other blogs, felt that I wrote smugly about my "easy" life without any class consciousness or respect for the fact that an economic downturn is affecting many people's lives. I was made into a caricature:

so bourgeois, so laden with economic privilege as to be tone deaf to the realities of most women's daily experiences; rich, easy, fabulous lives of professional people in coastal cities; to only have the kinds of problems wherein you have to choose between private schools and nannies, or fret over how best to represent yourself on Facebook

For me, there are two levels on which this issue must be examined. The first is the systemic level of class, race etc.-based privilege. We still live in a world where my white skin, my middle class upbringing, my able, not-fat body, and so many other factors of birth, not merit, give me power. This is a reality and anyone who claims otherwise is denying cold, hard facts and needs to unpack their knapsack, as Peggy McIntosh wrote. Those with knapsacks so heavy they drag on the ground, as well as those who carry a lighter load, are all responsible for fighting this system.

But what does that look like on a daily basis? I think that's the question that a lot of people avoid asking because it is either too painful or seems too hard. Many folks with privilege let guilt paralyze them, but what I learned long ago was that guilt doesn't put food on anyone's table or put anyone's story out into the world or even make me a smarter or more compassionate person. Another thing that folks with privilege often do is stay quiet or start fronting. Rather than admit when they've benefited from a system they may dislike, they pretend they haven't--falsely claiming money worries or putting on "struggling" airs. This is also unproductive, in addition to being inauthentic. It keeps privilege locked up.

There is a lot of amazing work out there questioning both of these reactions; check out Enough, a new blog that questions how much wealth accumulation is really necessary, and the work of Resource Generation, which gives wealthy young adults a chance to process their own responsibility and power and do productive, world-changing work with it.

So what does one do with privilege once you have it? Especially in an economic downturn when so many are being laid off, going without health insurance, losing their retirement, struggling with even basic necessities?

Last week, as the Obama administration and Congress debated exactly how far they were willing to go to deal with the current bleak economic realities, The New York Times highlighted the re-emergence of the rhetorical -- and policy -- discussion of the "safety net." One sentence pretty much sums it up:

Programs for the poor are often poor programs -- stigmatized and underfinanced.

But what happens when the people who need welfare are not characterized in the media as solely urban women of color? When the aid recipients include well-educated, former white-collar workers affected by the economic crisis, the vocabulary changes. Now it's suddenly a "safety net" -- a more positive, temporary-sounding term that does not have the same connotations as the much-maligned "W" word. 

In his 2004 book American Dream, Jason DeParle (who also reported the Times piece) summarizes the history of public assistance, and how society's perception of it changed depending on who was receiving that assistance. Welfare's earliest iteration was a Depression-era "safety net" program for widowed mothers. De Parle writes in the book,

The payments were reserved for a small elite of "fit" mothers with so-called suitable homes. That typically excluded divorced mothers and those with children born outside of marriage, and it almost always excluded racial minorities. The screening was so rigorous, those on the rolls were sometimes called "gilt-edged widows." Decades later, welfare would be condemned for encouraging poor women to not to work. But that was precisely what it was created to do--in Edwin Witte's words, "to release from the wage-earning role the parent whose task is to raise children."

When the government was strictly controlling which "fit" women were worth assisting, there was not a stigma attached to the aid. (To the contrary -- it was almost an honor!) This was a program that propped up traditional gender roles when society's anointed breadwinner (the husband and father) was deceased, and allowed these selected elite mothers to continue in their caregiving role full-time. But, as anti-discrimination and desegregation laws began to take hold, the "safety net" was widened to accept more women -- and the connotations of receiving aid began to shift. The "welfare queen" pejorative began appearing in the 1960s, as these programs were being integrated, and became a really destructive meme that public assistance has never really shaken. (The right wing bears a lot of responsibility for perpetuating this, but Democrats certainly aren't blameless, either.)

It's undeniable that the tanking economy is once again changing the face of who needs assistance to get by. Given the way people on public-assistance programs have been vilified, it will be interesting to see whether public perception actually does shift as demographics change. If I were feeling optimistic, I'd say that perhaps our country would come away from the economic crash with a more compassionate perspective on poverty, public assistance, and homelessness. But we'll see. I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: My friend Noah, who brings some very relevant work experience to this discussion, responds on his blog, disPlacement.

It's been fascinating to watch the media coverage of the economic meltdown as it relates gender (and class) in our society.

In January, data showed that men's participation in the workforce was declining faster than women's. Basically, in recessions, more men tend to lose their jobs than women, hence there is a greater percentage of women in the workforce. (Hmmm... if what's bad for the economy is also bad for traditional gender roles, you'd think the right wing would have clamored a little harder for the stimulus package.)

The New York Times was inspired to publish an article on the implications for masculinity:

Mr. Steuer, 43, was recently laid off from his job at a small research business. "It's hard not to imagine yourself as the breadwinner," he said. "A lot of your ego eggs are in the job basket. I can't shake the psychology that I'm supposed to provide."

The article takes great pains to portray Steuer as a modern man, presumably to highlight the level to which these outmoded views of masculinity are ingrained in our society. (Say it with me, now: "Patriarchy hurts men, too!") New research also shows that the incidence of domestic violence rises along with unemployment. I have a hard time believing this is unrelated to issues of control and masculinity. And, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, lack of money is a common reason why a woman may refuse to leave her abusive partner.

As Emily Bazelon writes, "I'm skeptical about the broad claim that men feel the pain of layoffs more than women do." Me too. As the Times article notes, near the end:

YET while men may appear to reel more socially and psychologically from job loss, they fare far better when it comes to re-employment.

In a 2002 study, two sociology professors at Wichita State University, Charles S. Koeber and David W. Wright, found that women who were laid off and went on to look for another job were re-employed less often than men in the same position.

The realities of layoffs are just as bad -- or even worse -- for women. The Times does not provide actual data on the psychological effects of layoffs on men versus women, but I'd wager that a significant number of upper-middle-class women DO strongly see their job as tied to their identity, and are likely suffering psychological effects of joblessness as well.

A nagging problem with this article -- as with so much coverage of the economy -- is that it focuses on people of one economic class (upper-middle or upper class), with the same family dynamic: two-income families with mixed-gender partners, where the male partner earns (or earned) more. I'm guessing the gender dynamics play out differently in families where the female partner is already the primary breadwinner, in families with much lower total incomes, in families where there is a single breadwinner (yes, I think there are still gender dynamics in play when there is only one head of household). But we're not reading much about them.

I understand that it's more interesting for the Times to write about gender dynamics in two-partner families where the male is the breadwinner. But, after awhile, the disproportionate coverage of impact of the economy on the upper-middle-class sends the message that these are the people who are most affected. That simply isn't true.

UPDATE: Girl w/ Pen has more links on this subject.

So, I suppose we can start to put together the list of things that the Bush Administration is going to try to pull before they leave office, one of the most nefarious being the "right of conscience" rule.

via LA Times.

Reporting from Washington -- The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial insemination and birth control.

For more than 30 years, federal law has dictated that doctors and nurses may refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further by making clear that healthcare workers also may refuse to provide information or advice to patients who might want an abortion.

So, essentially, even if you have the right to obtain an abortion, you may not have access to the information necessary to actually know all your options. I would never deny how smart a doctor is, but I don't really think it is up to a doctor to decide what is morally right for me or for my body. If the law has already decided that I can have access to reproductive technology, then why is a doctor allowed to tell me something different? I would like the advice I get from my doctor to be based on my health needs, not their religious and moral beliefs. I am sorry that is crazy.

According to Raw Story this change could hurt rural and poor women the hardest. Melissa Harris-Lacewell in conversation with Maddow over the subject discusses.

Harris-Lacewell explained that regulations like this "right of conscience" rule have "been the new strategy of those who have been opposed to women's reproductive rights. ... Rather than fight this out in the courts ... what you do is limit access. You limit the education that doctors are getting in medical school. You limit the ability of these doctors to practice in various states and localities. You just keep reducing, reducing, reducing."

"That has a disproportionate effect on poor women, on rural women," Harris-Lacewell stated. "Women who have private health insurance, women who have private physicians, tend to have plenty of access to a variety of reproductive rights options. Poor women and women with less access are the ones hit hardest."

Related:
Bush not done fucking with you yet.
Bush to Issue Midnight HHS Regulation.
Clinton moves to Block HHS Regulation.

White Dude Knows Best! Above: Men who want to control the bodies of women they deem unfit mothers. Louisiana state Rep. John LaBruzzo (left) and Texas state District Judge Charlie Baird (right).

It's been quite a week for government violation of the bodily integrity of poor women and women of color. First, there was the judge in Texas who set "not having children" as a condition of a woman's parole. (I just linked in the WFR on Sunday, but Cara discussed it at length. Go read her post.)

And today, via several readers, comes the news that John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, wants to pay low-income women $1,000 apiece to get sterilized. Everything about this is so incredibly offensive, I don't know quite where to begin. Let's start with a quote from LaBruzzo:

"We're on a train headed to the future and there's a bridge out, " LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. "And nobody wants to talk about it."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Low-income women having children is a "dangerous demographic trend"?! Sounds like the recent round of racist propaganda we saw related to the "Demographic Winter" movie. (Film summary: You should be panicked because brown people are reproducing at faster rates than white people.) But LaBruzzo protests that he is not a racist -- he's a problem-solver!

LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem. He said he is simply looking for new ways to address it.

"It's easy to say, 'Oh, he's a racist, ' " LaBruzzo said. "The hard part is to sit down and think of some solutions."

It's not as if this country has ever done a good job providing low-income women with the tools and information to make their own decisions. Programs that aim to do that have been consistently underfunded and poorly implemented. So no, we haven't tried all other options. And even if we had, his idea is still completely appalling.

LaBruzzo is correct that it's very easy to say he's a racist. Because, um, he's espousing a historically racist policy. What he clearly deems to be a new and creative solution has unfortunately been around a long time. Compulsory or coercive sterilizations for low-income women, disabled women, and women of color were extremely common up until the 1970s, and slightly less common but nevertheless occurring with regularity the the decades since. The paternalistic attitude that "certain women" cannot be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions is still an underlying theme of a lot of backwards legal and policy decisions. LaBruzzo and Texas judge Charlie Baird are part of this despicable tradition.

So it has taken me days to filter through all the different things going through my head about Burning Man. For those who have never heard, Burning Man is an annual party that attracts almost 50,000 people around the concept of art, life as art, self-sustainability, self-reliance, hedonism and music and to experience all of this in the desert for 1-2 weeks. Living in San Francisco for the last seven years, I certainly crossed paths with many that were life-long burners and had my own preconceived notions of what to expect. Some of what I had heard resonated, but nothing I had ever experienced matched up to going to Burning Man. What does a feminist woman of color see at Burning Man?

Well first and foremost, the art at Burning Man is as incredible as everyone claims it to be. I always hated those people that said, "sorry man, you don't understand, you have to see it to believe it," and I will spare you such proclamations. However, there is something about the huge scale of the art set in the dustiness of the desert that creates surreal visuals that can't be compared to much else I have seen before. The art made my trip to Burning Man worthwhile.

But, you are in the desert with almost 50,000 people in city built in weeks with streets, neighborhoods, themes and entire communities. Obviously you see much more than art. I will attempt to express what I felt, saw and experienced in the most coherent way possible.

The theme of this year's Burning Man was the "American Dream." Sounds corny, but my assumption was that in a space like BM we would see multiple moments of disrupting what we understand to be true of the American Dream. Perhaps new ways of envisioning borders, critical perspectives on the legal status of human beings or anti-war statements. Well, clearly I got a little too post-colonial fantasy making on myself, because every attempt at playing on the theme that I saw at Burning Man, failed. If I saw another American flag/peace symbol juxtaposition I thought I might keel over. When driving in they had quotes posted from key framers of American democracy, Alexis de Toqueville, Milton Friedman, even MLK. But they didn't have a quote from a single woman. Apparently, woman have never had anything to do with the framing, design or development of democracy.

Enough, a new online project by Dean Spade and Tyrone Boucher:

The ubiquity of capitalism in the U.S. can limit our ability, even in radical communities, to conceptualize creative responses to oppression and injustice. This can manifest both in how we build movements (reproducing bureaucratic, hierarchical, business-type models; packaging and "selling" social justice work to foundations in exchange for grants), and in how we deal with personal finances in our own lives (defaulting to patterns like hoarding, excessive consumerism, and individualism in how we conceptualize our lives and futures and economic security).

We'd like to address some of the ways that class privilege and capitalist dynamics function even within communities and within the lives of individuals working to fight oppression and economic injustice. It can feel taboo to share details about things like income, inheritance, class background, debt, and spending. Silence and secrecy about money make it difficult for us to challenge ourselves and each other when classist dynamics arise. Social conditioning trains us to hoard money rather than share it and build community. We want to get people talking about building shared values and practices around wealth redistribution, because we think figuring out how much is enough, and when to give away money, are key under-discussed questions in anti-capitalist politics.

I know I just added them to my google reader. They also encourage submissions.

Via Feministe

Heads up, Minnesota feminists!

via Poor Magazine:

"I was a formally homeless Mother who once lived in an abandoned building". This was my introduction to Cheri Honkala, Executive Director of the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), a coalition of organizations from across the country united in the mission to "abolish poverty everywhere and forever".

As Cheri's words came through the phone I felt an instant connection to her. Having grown up with a Mother battling addiction - evictions, hunger and instability were my constant companions.

Cheri and the PPEHRC foster that same connection in poor people across color lines and across the country. She has been organizing with other poor folks for the last twenty-five years, and on September 2nd, the second day of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in St. Paul Minnesota, over a year of Cheri's full time efforts will come to fruition as the PPEHRC embarks on "The March For Our Lives", what will be one of the largest poor peoples marches ever to take place.

The March for Our Lives schedule is here.

The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign also has blog, where they're chronicling the process of putting together this mega-march. Check it out.

Jack has a great post up at AngryBrownButch (and Feministe) about a new Demos report on the instability of the Black and Latino middle class. Jack shares some really interesting insights from childhood, and it inspired me to share some of my own thoughts.

From the report:

African-American and Latino families have more difficulty moving into the middle class, and families that do enter the middle class are less secure and at higher risk than the middle class as a whole. Overall, more African-American and Latino middle-class families are at risk of falling out of the middle class than are secure. This is in sharp contrast to the overall middle class, in which 31 percent are secure and 21 percent are at risk.

My parents are Cuban exiles, who immigrated here in the 60s shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. The reason why class has such different implications for immigrant families in the US is because they bring their class histories with them from their countries of origin.

Some vintage sexist, classist advertising:

Because we all know that being female "warrants immaculacy under any and all conditions." That includes during your period, ladies.

Yvette Bello joined Latino Community Services (LCS) in June 2005 and is currently serving as the Executive Director. Based in Hartford, Conn., LCS works to reduce the further spread of HIV/AIDS among the Latino community and other populations at risk, and improve the quality of life of individuals affected by HIV/AIDS.

Yvette also serves on the board of the Medical Interpreting Association of Connecticut, The Ryan White Latino Caucus, the Connecticut Association for Nonprofits board and the Mayor's Commission on AIDS.

Here's Yvette...

Sandy Shin is program coordinator at Breakthrough USA. Breakthrough is an international human rights organization that uses media, education and pop culture to promote values of dignity, equality and justice. It has two offices, one in NYC and one in New Delhi, India.

Sandy Shin has a Masters in Human Rights from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies and Sociology from the University of Albany. She was the Legal Advocate Project Director at the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault where she coordinated statewide trainings and provided constituents and the general public with services. Sandy has also been involved with community-driven social movements led by local activists employing anti-racism, anti-war ideologies.

Here's Sandy...

To update from my post on Tuesday about the demolition of four housing projects in New Orleans, activists (including my homies at Ruckus--raise the roof!) yesterday stopped the bulldozers with a 30 person blockade.

via AP.

Protesters wielding bullhorns and shouting "housing is a human right" stopped demolition at a massive public housing complex Wednesday in this hurricane-ravaged city in dire need of homes for the poor.

More than 30 protesters blocked an excavator from entering the fenced-off area of the B.W. Cooper complex. It was the first of what likely will be many standoffs between protesters and demolition crews that are tearing down hundreds of barracks-style buildings so they can be replaced with mixed-income neighborhoods.

Contributed by Miriam Pérez

The NYTimes Style section had an article yesterday about "baby mama gifts," "baby baubles" and so-called "push presents." These refer to gifts given to women shortly after giving birth, as a reward for enduring pregnancy and childbirth. The author makes it seem like this is a trend sweeping the nation, in addition to it being a throw back "from the time cavemen brought trinkets to their wives." The article starts with out with a story of a woman presented diamond earrings by her husband in the delivery room after 17 hours of labor. It continues through the stories of women who received any number of gifts: rings, watches, bracelets, even a hot tub.

"It's more and more an expectation of moms these days that they deserve something for bearing the burden for nine months, getting sick, ruining their body," said Linda Murray, executive editor of BabyCenter.com.

The interesting thing about this trend is its connection to the concept of valuing women's work. If pregnancy and childbirth has value, should women be compensated for the time and effort that they are putting into childbearing? If so, what kind of compensation would be fair? Conversations about paying women to serve as surrogate mothers have stirred up these conversations, and some states want to make it illegal to compensate women for more than their medical expenses during surrogacy arrangements. Placing value on women's work (in the home, rearing children, etc) is a feminist dialogue that has been going on for decades, but this kind of materialistic compensation definitely doesn't sit well with me. How about we think of more creative and beneficial ways honor the work of motherhood.

"This isn't the time to give a $200 piece of jewelry," said Rhonda Grote, president of ThinkThoughtful.com, an online gift consulting company in Bradenton, Fla. "I do not think that because a woman has had a baby she requires a Tiffany & Company item. She requires help, love and emotional support."

Bush's proposed 2008 spending on the Women, Infants and Children program (which provides food vouchers to low-income women and their children up to age 5) would leave roughly half a million people in the lurch. The price of food and milk has soared, but Bush's budget isn't keeping pace.

Doug Greenaway, executive director of the National WIC Association, which represents state and local agencies, said states probably would deter new applicants and cut new mothers, rather than pregnant women and children.

"Once the word gets out on the street that the program is in some kind of funding jeopardy, people will say, 'Wow, there isn't an opportunity for me to participate,' " Greenaway said. "It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Depressing.

Reader Deanna sent us a copy of this letter she wrote to Safeway about her experience buying groceries there with WIC (Women, Infants and Children) checks. I'll let her speak for herself:

I am a mother of two children, a full time student and full supporter of my family and because of that I have been on WIC to help with groceries. I have been on WIC for about 5 years now and have always gone to Safeway to purchase my items. I have run into amazing checkers that have been courteous and kind every time, but I have also had my share of checkers that seem outright annoyed with me due to having WIC and because it takes a little longer process to go through with my checks.

I have dealt with these rude people and have talked to managers, but I have never felt so hurt and embarrassed to be on WIC as I had on the day I showed up to your California store Wednesday, November 7, 2007. I had picked up my items and went to check out. I first noticed the bagger that just finished the person ahead of me and as soon as he saw me pull out my WIC checks, he left. I let it go until I approached the checker let him know that I had WIC. Keep in mind that because I know it is a longer process to go through, I make sure that all my items are in order and just try to do my best to speed up the process for you guys and the people in line behind me.

If you read the news you already know about the housing crisis and the subprime lending bubble that is threatening to burst. You know the whole lending money that doesn't exist to people that can't afford to buy a house. The MSM is all over this issue, but has overlooked one aspect of it, which is that the highest concentration of these loans goes to low-income, working class, communities of color, and thusly continuing a resource disparity.

According to the NYT and common sense, subprime lending occurs at a higher rate in the black and Latino community.

Lenders say that in general higher rates are justified to account for the bigger risks posed by borrowers who have a poor record at paying bills on time and defaulting on debts. And a recent Federal Reserve study noted that neighborhoods where people tend to have lower credit scores also tend to a greater concentration of high-cost loans.

The study suggests that the concentration of high-cost loans is not caused by an area’s racial makeup, though there is a correlation, said Jay Brinkmann, vice president for research and economics at the Mortgage Bankers Association.

But the Fed study also suggests that a big part of the reason may have to do with the lenders that minority borrowers do business with. The biggest home lenders in minority neighborhoods are mortgage companies that provide only subprime loans, not full-service banks that do a range of lending.

Ultimately, if you are poor or have bad credit, a subprime loan looks good to you. You sign at an interest rate that is too low to beat and then within months your interest rate goes up, sometimes 3-fold. This has led to forbearance or delinquency on loans and an increase in forclosures on homes. This is not only bad for the economy, but critical in maintaining an economic divide along racial lines. The folks impacted the most are the ones rarely discussed in the coverage of this issue. People of color, women of color and poor people are among the most affected by the inadequacy of subprime lending. It also makes their credit that much worse than it already was before.

If you are interested in the lack of media coverage of race and it's relationship to development, housing and gentrification, check out my co-worker Karlos's blogs and the current campaign my organization is working on around the media rights of communities being displaced by unjust economic policies. We have also put out a content analysis looking at the lack of coverage around displacement in Bay Area news outlets.

(Sorry for the reposts, formatting was funky.)

I'm in (currently) cloudy Durham, North Carolina today for a conference called "Why We Can’t Wait: Reversing the Retreat on Civil Rights" from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund and the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. Great, and packed agenda for the next two days. I'll keep you updated. One of this morning's sessions will feature Lilly Ledbetter, from Supreme Court case Ledbetter v. Goodyear.

According to a new study, done by researchers at Wayne State and University of Michigan, black women are three times less likely to receive chemotherapy and five times less likely to receive Tamoxifen (a drug used to help treat breast cancer) than their white counterparts.

The study examined medical records from 651 women diagnosed with breast cancer at a major university hospital and cancer center in Detroit from 1990 to 1996. Of the women, 242 were white and 388 were black.

Previous studies had also shown differences in treatment rates between blacks and whites, but discerning the reasons for the differences was often difficult.

Despite previous studies having found difference in the types of cancer that black women get verse white women, it is clear that it is cultural and racial factors that motivate the difference between why white women get the treatment they need more than black women do.

Most experts were not surprised by the results of the study, but stated that figuring out why the differences existed would be difficult.

"It is sometimes very difficult to determine whether disparities are due to race or other factors," said Moy. "But in my opinion, race is a very important factor to consider."

"It is probably multifactorial," said Dr. Herbert Smitherman Jr., assistant dean of community and urban health at the Wayne State School of Medicine in Detroit. "The choices that people make are clearly a composite expression of their social and cultural circumstances, their conditions of living and the conditions of their community."

Finally, some findings that makes sense! The way you relate to you doctor is in fact different based on your cultural background. If you are distrusting of medical institutions, you may not feel comfortable demanding what you need, or engaging in a way that can fully serve you.

via ABCNews.

Sol Mills does corporate social responsibility for a living, she works for CSCC. Originally named Cal Safety Compliance Corporation, it pioneered the concept of safety compliance inspections in the California apparel community. The company grew and changed its name to CSCC. Today CSCC provides corporate social responsibility consulting services to a variety of industries around the world, including garments and textiles, home furnishings, hard-lines, technology, cosmetics, toys, food processing, and agriculture.

Just to make sure, the following responses represent only the personal opinions of Ms. Mills and not of CSCC, the company.

Here's Sol...

A judge ruled today that the new Planned Parenthood clinic in Aurora, Illinois, won't be allowed to open. The court sided with the city attorney, who argued PP violated land use and permit regulations -- and that this supposedly isn't about abortion. (Yeah, right.) PP lawyers responded, "We wouldn't be here if this was a foot care clinic."

It's bad news in the short term, but legal precedent appears to side with us on this one. In a nearly identical case (PDF) out of New Hampshire in 2001, the court came down in favor of Planned Parenthood.

At today's hearing the city attorney also said, "The city of Aurora's image is important." Which, I think, is so revealing -- I'm struck by the class angle to all of this. The new clinic is "tucked between a supermarket, a Blockbuster Video, and a cluster of upscale homes" in the suburbs. It's clear that this is not just about opposing abortions in general. It's that some residents don't like the idea of abortion (and contraception) being available down the street from their McMansions. It's the attitude that abortion is an icky thing, best left to the seedy parts of town. I know the serious anti-choice crazies are going to come protest no matter what, but I really wonder if there would be any local opposition to this clinic if it was opening between a liquor store and a Popeye's on a strip in the bad part of town. My guess is no.

It's also curious to watch anti-choicers decry the fact that the new Planned Parenthood clinic is a $7.5 million, state-of-the-art facility. Because they're used to portraying abortion clinics as dilapidated and riddled with health-code violations. This new clinic clearly conflicts with that stereotype. They're going so far as to call the new clinic the "Abortion Fortress." (I prefer "Contraception Fortress" or "Pap Smear Fortress," thankyouverymuch.) Of course, they fail to acknowledge that the reason for the fortress-like facade is the so-called pro-lifers' tendency to lash out violently at women's health care providers. Ahem.

And speaking of hardcore forced-pregnancy activists, Eric Scheidler responded to today's ruling with some serious co-opting of pro-choice language, calling the decision "a great victory for choice -- freedom of choice for the people of Aurora to determine their own destiny." Yeah, people of Aurora who don't have uteruses.

More to come as the story develops...

Via reader Wyndi comes this truly gross NPR piece about how the wealthy are apparently breeding like crazy, in a trend dubbed (seriously) "competitive birthing." One mother actually says, "Baby number 4 has become the new must-have accessory."

Given the incredibly high cost of raising children these days -- with housing, child care, camps, clothing, and college tuition -- big families are apparently now a status symbol. A lot of the NPR story is anecdotal, but the reporter does talk to a demographics analyst, who says that census data shows the number of high-income families having three or four kids has shot up 30 percent in the last 10 years. "It's an unprecedented jump, and completely counter to 100 years of history," he says.

I feel like the kids-as-status-symbol story bubbles up occasionally. But what's new here, if you take the NPR reporter's word for it, is that having lotsa babies has become a way for super-educated moms who have left the workforce to "justify" their choice to opt out.

In other words, the more kids, the more comfortable these women seem with their stay-at-home status. One mom explains, "I know in some sense I feel more validated to say I'm a mother of four. Of course I'm not working now! What are you thinking? How could i possibly do anything else? This is a full-time job." Another says that having more kids "gets you a lot more recognition for a notoriously thankless job."

I have no idea how widespread this "trend" really is. But it doesn't seem completely far-fetched to me that women who used to be career-driven would want to direct their competitive energies somewhere -- and for some women, that's become a quest to be the best mom. ("Best" in this case, of course, equals "most kids.") Says one woman, "All that drive gets channeled into the children when they quit their job."

It's also easy to see that a formerly successful businesswoman would feel pressured to ensure that anyone could tell, just by looking at the size of her brood, that there's no way she could have continued to work outside the home. It's as if more babies are a defense mechanism -- not only against the raised eyebrows and judgments of women who stayed in the workforce, but also against any doubts these wealthy breeders may themselves harbor about their decision to opt out.

A recent study found that women are less likely to ask for higher salaries because when they do the social costs are far greater than when men ask for raises. You know the usual--I don't want to work with an aggressive, ball-busting bitch.

The study first done by a professor, who noticed that women Ph.d candidates were less likely to be teaching classes than men, decided to inquire.

When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: "The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a course,' and none of the women had done that," she said. "The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, 'Who wants to teach?' " The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations.

These differences, Babcock and other researchers have concluded, may partially explain the persistent gender gap in salaries, as well as other disparities in how people rise to the top of organizations. Women working full time earn about 77 percent of the salaries of men working full time, Babcock said. That figure does not take differing professions and educational levels into account, but when those and other factors are controlled for, women who work full time and have never taken time off to have children earn about 11 percent less than men with equivalent education and experience.

The studies done were all really interesting as were the conclusions.

"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

They luckily moved past the tired and archaic, 'women are genetically inferior' bull, and looked at reasons outside of just blaming women for not being aggressive enough in demanding salaries. They found that there are clear social ramifications for women to ask for raises. It is dangerous for them to do so as they will hurt their reputation and potentially hurt their work environment.

Furthermore, I think that women are so used to working twice as hard as men, they may not always think they can get a raise. They have probably internalized the message that they are lucky they got the job in the first place. Naturally you can't totally generalize, but in a lot of cases, it is not that women don't believe they deserve it, or they are afraid of being perceived as a bitch, they just don't believe they will actually get it.

The reality is, women do the majority of work, in non-profits, in education, in government jobs, in corporations, in health care and in universities and men make the majority of the money. Still. Today.

Maybe that is why women don't ask for raises. When was the last time you asked for a raise? And I know damn well you deserve it.

via MSNBC.

The Observer had a piece yesterday on the media's obsession with the "Bad Girls of Hollywood," and questions why everyone seems to get off on watching these irritating rich, white women get in trouble.

While an obvious answer to this is that it's entertaining to see these overly privileged bad gals like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan who think they can get away with anything not only be treated as criminals just as any one of us would, but also have overwhelming flaws and personal problems. (In other words, rich life ain't all that grand.)

But is there more to it? And what is so appealing about famous women's demise rather than the lads? 'We have had years of young male stars running amok. It is now so much more fun for the public to see beautiful young women being hauled off to jail,' said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, New York state.

Is this saying something bigger about our culture? Why is it so much fun to watch "beautiful women" be imprisoned--or drug-addicted or clearly sick with eating disorders? And the comparison of these women's behavior with "Girls Gone Wild" is irksome as well; it's almost being posed as some kind of fetish. And who are we blaming?

To put it simply: is this a feminist issue?

Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy, and the editor of three nonfiction anthologies: That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation; Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving; and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients. She is at it again with her latest anthology, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.

I caught up with Mattilda over email. Here's Mattilda...

Originally posted at Racewire.

These pictures are too much for me.

Talk about the wedding industrial complex has been all over the place and I like it. But the conversation of race and culture has been left out of the larger discussion. How does capitalism intersect with wedding rituals in cultures other than mainstream white culture? Looking through the wedding section of Nirali has me perplexed (and cracking up) thinking about South Asian weddings in the US and how they typify this notion of the "wedding industrial complex". I have been to many and at this point I have just stopped going. I am 29 and don't plan on getting married. In fact I vehemently oppose getting married, and really can't afford to fly all over the country for a ritual I have deep problems with.

The weddings that I have seen and many of the weddings characterized in Nirali, don't really seem like weddings that are about love and romance. They seem more like business mergers and marketing ploys. Some weddings even get straight to the point and ask that you don't bring boxed gifts, just a check. Nothing says love like having all your friends give you a few thousand dollars. And clearly love can only *really* happen if you spend 70K and have 500 of your closest friends present.

Weddings in India are huge as well, but in the US they are huge, elaborate, cheesy and cost a small fortune. It has become the norm in the middle class South Asian community to have a huge wedding and spend a ton of money whether you have it or not. It is a new way to become American in an Indian way. For example, "something old, something new, " is not a South Asian tradition! That is the placement of US romantic fetish marketing within South Asian chic. Romantic heterosexuality, having money and raising a normal family have become encoded in the "becoming" process for second generation South Asian Indians. And since being American seems to be all about capitalist consumption they may almost succeed, except for that post 9/11 'you look like a terrorist snag.' (Which may be the fear that exaggerates it in the first place, but let me not get ahead of myself.).

It is so lame. Neela at Hyphen delves deeper.

Thoughts?

Well this is just lovely. What's the best advice that Marlys Harris, Senior Editor of Money Magazine, has for women? "Snag" yourself a "Richie Rich."

True, it's not politically correct to go hunting for a marital meal ticket (or for that matter, to write about it). But just for a moment imagine the life that could be yours if you did.

Forget the fabulous baubles, designer clothing, cutting-edge electronics and palatial mansions that your golden goose - uh, spouse - might heap upon you.

Consider the more pragmatic bonuses of the good life. No more scrimping and scraping to make your annual Roth IRA contribution. No more working until you drop to ensure a comfortable retirement. And no more worries about where your children will get into college (or how to pay for it).

That's of course until you're served with divorce papers and find yourself with no job, no work history and...well, generally just fucked.

But why encourage women to seek out higher education or give them advice on finding high-paying jobs when you can just recommend marrying a billionaire? But Harris does say you should get a degree and work on your smarts--just not for silly things like success or personal fulfillment.

To worm your way into a billionaire's business, and eventually his heart, you need the right career. An M.B.A. will give you the most flexibility.

...Ultrarich men once gravitated toward women with the showiest plumage - or plastic surgery. That has changed, says Richard Conniff, author of The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide.

"Arm candy is now seen as déclassé," he notes. These days, the more prestigious your credentials and the brainier you are, the better.

Amazing how an article about money can be so devoid of any class.

Photo by Niesha Studio, copyright 2006.

Audacia Ray is an executive editor of $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers, and is a contributor to the porn blog Fleshbot. She is also the director/producer of a bisexual feature adult film, The Bi Apple and head of her blog, WakingVixen.com. Audacia describes herself as "a sex nerd in both bookish and salacious ways."

Here's Audacia...

Queercents, founded and headed up by Nina Smith, is a personal finance blog serving the LGBT community. Launched in April 2006, Queercents is produced by a variety of writers, including Nina.

Nina has a strong background in finances and financial planning. By day she sells software and conducts her own real estate investments--fixing and selling properties for hefty profits--and by night she runs Queercents. Nina started blogging because she was looking for a creative outlet in her life.

Here's Nina...

Oh, how I hate these.

The title deceived me into thinking this piece is going to be a critique of the wedding industry, yet ended up being anything but.

Apparently in our “post-feminist� world, women aren’t giving up their identity by having a traditional wedding, but are in fact demonstrating their wealth and independence.

While I obviously agree with the contention that wedding culture is obsessed with consumerism, the article is saying that this somehow negates the belief that it’s a sexist industry. Rebecca Mead’s argues this in her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Getting married used to mark the bride's transition from the parental home to the marital home; from adolescence to adulthood. But today, brides are no longer demure virgins in white lace quivering at the altar; rather, they are professional, self-supporting 30-somethings - more often than not masterminding the operation.

...this fairytale fantasy doesn't make a wedding anti-feminist, says Mead. On the contrary: ‘This is the moment where women can enact this Cinderella fantasy - but it is a safe enactment,’ says Mead, ‘You can look like a virgin princess, but no one expects you to be a virgin, and the next day you can go back to being your strong, liberated self.’ She argues that the modern wedding is not a repudiation of feminism, but partly a result of it.

But why would you want to look like a virgin princess? Shouldn't we be talking about why that's still appealing to people rather than welcoming it with open arms?

I’m not trying to knock on people who want to have a traditional wedding, wear the white dress and even spend a lot of money on it, but to not only downplay the history of a sexist ritual (the bride’s “transition� should actually be "ownership") but say feminism is partly behind the consumerist-driven wedding industry because women are now capable of being self-sufficient?? Please.

Let's also not forget that not all women make enough money (or have the "right" partner, for that matter) to afford the fairy tale wedding. All this looks like to me is an extravagant way of telling women that the more they spend on their weddings, the more empowered they are. Blegh.

From left to right: Sharon Kedar and Manisha Thakor.

Sharon Kedar and Manisha Thakor both have extensive experience in the financial services industry. At various points of their careers they have each worked as financial analysts, portfolio managers, and client servicing/marketing executives for leading investment management firms with billions of dollars in assets under management. Both Manisha and Sharon earned MBA degrees from Harvard Business School and are Chartered Financial Analyst (“CFA�) charterholders.

Manish and Sharon dedicate their newly released book, On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl's Guide to Personal Finance to all women.

Here's Manisha and Sharon...

This post by Wendy Muse on Racialicious just about sums up (really well) what I have been feeling about the hipsters all up in "our hoodz stealin all our fashionz." I also feel old as I wore door knockers the first time around (NY in the 80's) eeek.

Muse is discussing all her personal negotiations and some of the political stakes involved with "ghetto chic." She says,

For one, it’s a matter of nomenclature. The term “ghetto� is evocative of “negative� images (poverty, housing projects, crime, drug use, lack of education), and remains racialized by the media. Ghettoes and poverty are typically associated with blacks and Latinos, even though as a result of the racial demographics of the United States, there are technically more poor whites. According to a U.S. Census Bureau Press Release from 2003, though “non-Hispanic whites had a lower poverty rate than other racial groups, [they] accounted for 44 percent of the people in poverty,� which makes me wonder why whites are virtually ignored in discussions of class and blacks and Latinos are always assumed to make up the majority of the poor population in this country. . . but that’s another article.

A few months ago I was sitting in a coffee shop in my neighborhood, a coffee shop I can no longer go to as I may fight somebody, and this white "hipster" boy sat down across from me wearing a red bandana tied on the front of his head, Tupac style. That's right, he was "GANGSTA." I am not laughing. I shot him the nastiest look and freaked him out so he didn't want to share the table with me, but I was raging inside.

I worked in the schools in and around San Francisco's Mission District for about 5 years and am very familiar with the problems that are tearing our schools apart and our communities. Our kids didn't wear red. And I thought about how this kid, moved into the Mission and was just walking around wearing a flag, like he is on some shit. I thought that god forbid if he got shot (which is highly unlikely, I don't want to further sensationalize gang violence the way the media does) how the media would cover it. They wouldn't say anything about his ignorance of any of the local politics or any of the racist ways that these people just move on in and visually violate these communities. To move into a community, uninformed, taking from it, not giving back and flaunting your expensive Ipod and "ghetto chic" accessories, is a form of violence.

I may be sounding like a hater, and maybe I am just too old to get it, but I AM FED UP WITH THESE KIDS. I hate Vice Magazine and I hate this attitude that pretty much says, "I am so passed racist, I can act like this." Wake up asshole, look around you, you are part of the problem.

This is much less articulate than Wendy's post, lol. I wrote about this a few years ago, when I had heard about the "Kill Whitey," parties in Brooklyn. I had hoped that the trend was dying out, but I was oh so wrong. I am so moving back to Oakland (although I hear they are invading there as well).

Martha Diaz is the president of The Hip-Hop Association, and producer of the H2O International Film Festival and Hip-Hop Education Summit, amongst many other projects. An educator, organizer and filmmaker, her impact in hip hop can be traced to her early days as a young and aspiring production assistant for the late Ted Demme, the groundbreaking producer and director behind "Yo! MTV Raps. "

The H2O International Film Festival is taking place May 31-June 15, 2007 in New York City and its theme is "The World Is Yours?" It “highlights the Hip-Hop community of the early/mid 90’s; a time when youth in the community began demanding money, power, and respect.�

I caught up with Martha over email. Here's Martha...

The front page (and most emailed) article of the Times yesterday was titled, “For Girls, It’s be Yourselves, and Be Perfect Too.� I was really looking forward to reading the piece but will admit I ended up a bit disappointed.

The article began a discussion of what female teens endure in terms of the pressure not only to be pretty and popular, but also to get into the best school, have the best resume, be a part of most of the school clubs, etc. But as the piece continued, I found that the article was focused more narrowly on privileged population of girls at one of the best high schools in the country and their pressure to get into an Ivy League college. One small example:

High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.

Now that’s tough. I personally felt really fortunate to have the opportunity to take courses at Kaplan when I was in high school. Don’t get me wrong; going to a “specialized� high school in NYC definitely came with a lot of academic pressure, and I don’t doubt that these girls endure this as well as overall pressure from everyone to establish themselves as successful young women in the world. At the same time, I find it interesting that an article that really just boils down to a few rich girls’ experiences of applying to Ivy League colleges would attract so much attention. There also seemed to be a lack of discussion on the difference between male teens’ experiences and these young women, besides their expensive fashion sense, of course.

With television and pop culture becoming so engrossed with America’s rich (ex. Laguna Beach, Paris Hilton, etc.), I’d personally prefer not to see the same obsession with the dramatic and sooo stressful lives of the upper class leaking into mainstream news as well. We have bigger stories to cover.

UPDATE: What's Good for Girls has more.

Kerrita McClaughlyn (left) and colleagues at the International Diabetes Federation’s 19th World Diabetes Congress in Cape Town, South Africa in December 2006.

Kerrita McClaughlyn is the media relations coordinator of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) based in Brussels, Belgium. For over 50 years, IDF has been at the forefront of global diabetes advocacy. The Federation is committed to raising global awareness of diabetes, promoting adequate diabetes care and prevention, and encouraging activities towards finding a cure for the different types of diabetes that many people are not aware of.

Kerrita answered my questions over email. Here’s Kerrita…

Check out Feministe's Jill's HuffPo piece on the proposed bill in Texas that would offer young women $500 (essentially $.07 per hour) to give their babies up for adoption instead of having abortions.

On March 10th, HBO will premiere a film, Life Support, starring Queen Latifah, about a HIV-positive black woman from a low-income community in Brooklyn who becomes an AIDS activist.

As someone who works for an organization in Bedford Stuyvesant that educates girls about HIV prevention, which is the neighborhood that partly inspired the director for this film (the film is based on his sister’s life), it’s great to see the HIV/AIDS crisis in these communities brought to light. (Not to mention with a female protagonist.)

One hope I have is that the film touches not only on the struggle the main character goes through but the larger reasons behind why HIV/AIDS is so prevalent in these communities. It’s seeming to be pitched as a story of redemption, of choices this woman made and how she ended up giving back to her community; I just hope that the lack of choices she had, particularly as a woman, are exposed as well.

Then again, I doubt the movie (nor Latifah) will disappoint me.

Suburban housewives dancing on poles! Everybody panic! What has the world come too?

Pole dancing, once exclusively the province of exotic dancers, has flared up as a much-hyped Hollywood exercise craze, and has seeped into the collective unconscious through shows like “The Sopranos� and “Desperate Housewives.� A variant called motorized pole dancing, which occurs in stretch limos, has raised eyebrows as far away as Britain, where some female university students pole-danced as a fund-raiser for testicular cancer. And mini-poles have even been spotted as dance props at over-the-top bat mitzvah parties in suburban precincts.

Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,� such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration.

The pole craze? Has mainstream culture embraced strippers in the name of "femme empowerment"?

Some say exercise that echoes the acrobatics done by women who take their clothes off for a living is exploitative rather than empowering. But Ms. Shteir and Joan Price, the author of “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty� (Seal Press, 2006), see a clear difference between middle-class, middle-aged women choosing to give parties in their homes and women pushed by poverty into potentially dangerous or demeaning work.

Yeah I didn't think so. It is OK to pole dance if you are a suburban housewife, in fact it is even empowering! But if you do it for a living you are engaging in nasty, demeaning work that is dangerous (and well they may not say it but, you are also a bad person, who is slutty and probably doesn't even deserve basic human rights).

It just seems so hypocritical.

via NYTimes.

Some of the women who run Casa Atabex Ache.

Daynara Marte has been executive director of the “House of Womyn Power� Casa Atabex Ache in the South Bronx of New York for four years. She came to Casa in 1999 as an intern and has stayed and moved up in the organization ever since.

"Casa" in Spanish means house. "Atabex" is one of the many names for the Taino goddess or earth mother of Puerto Rico. Taino are the indigenous people of Puerto Rico, and other islands in the Caribbean. "Ache" means power in Yoruba, the language of a West African ethnic group.

Between 30 to 65 young women learn about self empowerment through cultural and indigenous rituals, spirituality, and social justice at Casa Atabex Ache at any given time. Currently, Dayanara is working on outreaching to the large Mexican immigrant community living in the South Bronx. Many fear entering community establishments and being asked for their immigration papers.

Here’s Dayanara…

Check out this disturbing Indian commercial for Fair & Lovely skin whitener (made by Unilever, which also manufactures Dove's "real beauty" products... and Axe). Here's a synopsis:

One TV commercial aired in India (often referred to as the Air Hostess advertisement) “showed a young, dark-skinned girl’s father lamenting he had no son to provide for him, as his daughter’s salary was not high enough – the suggestion being that she could not get a better job or get married because of her dark skin. The girl then uses the cream [Fair & Lovely], becomes fairer, and gets a better-paid job as an air hostess – and makes her father happy�.

Sexism, classism and racism, tied up together in a neat little 60-second spot! A similar ad for a whitener made by Pond's -- also a Unilever brand -- drew criticism a few years ago:

"Those ads are incredible," says Malaysian social activist Cynthia Gabriel, referring to the Unilever ads. "Whitening creams are capitalizing on a market that's quite racist and biased toward people who are lighter."

Responded a Unilever rep:

"Our TV commercial was never intended to suggest any correlation between skin color and beauty. We leave that to each individual to interpret according to his or her culture, background and education."

High-end whiteners are also sold by Chanel and Shiseido in the U.S. But they're huge in countries like China, India and Malaysia, where they help perpetuate the idea that whiter skin = more respect = success in life. They also pose health risks.

As Salon points out, the popularity of Fair & Lovely (the best-selling whitening cream in the world) provides fodder for a debate about whether marketing to lower-income populations helps or hurts them.

Not surprisingly, [manufacturer] HLL claims Fair & Lovely is doing good by fulfilling a social need. They argue that 90 percent of Indian women want to use whiteners because it is “aspirational…. A fair skin is like education, regarded as a social and economic step up� (Luce and Merchant, 2003).

But Fair & Lovely isn't a step up or solution; it only enforces the prejudices that contribute to economic and social inequality.

Via Nerve.

As someone who runs a Equity in Health and Fitness Program at a nonprofit in Central Brooklyn, I thought it was necessary to spread the word on this one.

Check out more on Opportunity Agenda. It looks like they're doing some great stuff.

This is just horrible:

Researchers found that doctors were more likely to reduce the chemotherapy dose for heavier [breast cancer] patients and those who were less educated, and lived in zip codes with lower median household income and higher levels of poverty. Severely obese patients were four times more likely to receive a reduced dose, and women with less than a high school education were three times as likely to have a dose reduction.

And the reason behind this?

‘We speculate that physicians have concerns about a patient's ability to tolerate the side effects of chemotherapy and that the physician's uncertainty about a patient's tolerance increases with increasing social distance. One might just as well ask why we are willing to give full doses to someone with more education. It may be that negotiating side effects and continued doses of treatment is easier when there is more shared culture,’ says lead study author Jennifer Griggs, M.D., MPH, associate professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School. Griggs was at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., when she completed this research.

How exactly does their educational background or income level factor into medical treatment again? 'Cause I'm not getting it. The doctors, more or less, can't relate to these women as well, so therefore they give them an inadequate dosage of treatment? The fact that this may be one reason behind why women of lower income and education have a lower survival rate of breast cancer should be a call for some serious looking-into. Because this is just fucked.

Our oh-so-favorite Forbes has released profiles of the 20 richest women in entertainment.

What I wonder is why it’s necessary to include their marital status and number of kids as two primary facts of information in their introduction?

While Ann posted a few months ago on the recruitment of young women to donate their eggs for stem cell research and the safety risks involved, ethical questions have been raised regarding compensation.

While there’s been some controversy about women getting paid to donate their eggs to fertility clinics, the fact that women are getting paid to donate their eggs for stem cell research has created some talk.

One of the bigger questions posed regarding this asks whether getting compensated for donating eggs to stem cell research exploits lower-class women. Marcy Darnovsky, the associate director of the Center of Genetics and Society, says that a woman’s need to survive could override the medical risks involved in donating eggs:

'I think any woman who's trying to pay the rent and put food on the table, and people who don't have a lot of money to spare, are going to be tempted to discount the risks and overvalue the benefits.'

But like Ann’s previous post, some states in the U.S. have enacted a law classifying egg donors as “research subjects,� so you could potentially say the same thing could happen for any research subject. Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at John Hopkins University also says there are ways of avoiding exploitation, like ensuring that a variety of groups of women are recruited to donate, as well as putting limits on the number of times women can donate.

At the same time, some of the most heinous cases of exploitation in this country were due to flawed research methods, so donors' protection should be an absolute priority.

Rosalie Little Thunder is a long-time Native community and environmental activist. Of the Sicangu band of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota, Rosalie has been on the frontlines to save the wild herd of bison that roams Yellowstone National Park.

I spoke with Rosalie over the phone yesterday about her activism for the new year. There’s a deep trail between her home and Yellowstone. Here’s Rosalie…

After numerous assaults on women walking home by themselves late at night in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, two Brooklyn, New York neighborhoods, partners Oraia Reid and Consuelo Ruybal decided to do something about it. RightRides has been giving many women, trans and gender queer folks rides home since 2004.

In honor of the official “RightRides for Women’s Safety Day� on Thursday, December 14, RightRides is hosting a special celebratory event at the Cake Shop in New York City. Come show your support if you’re in the city.

Here’s Oraia…

A New York Times photo

Andrea Batista Schlesinger has been the Executive Director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI), a think tank for the progressive movement, for five years. Under Andrea’s leadership, DMI has released several important policy papers to national audiences, including “Middle Class 2004: How Congress Voted,� “People and Politics in America’s Big Cities,� and “From Governance to Accountability: Building Relationships that Make Schools Work.�

And just in case you need an extra boost to help get you to the polls on Tuesday, here’s Andrea…

Lakshmi Chaudhry has been a writer and a reporter for independent publications for more than six years. And now she’s the Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and Contributing Writer at The Nation magazine. Lakshmi was a Senior Editor at In These Times for a year and before that the Senior Editor of Alternet.org for three.

Lakshmi is also the co-author of Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq and Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics.

I interviewed Lakshmi last month by phone. Here’s Lakshmi…

Tamar McFarlane has worked with Families United for Racial & Economic Equality (FUREE), a multi-racial, women-led, membership-run organization based in Brooklyn, New York, for the last two years. While at FUREE, she has worked on welfare reform, youth empowerment, and the beginning of a pay equity childcare campaign. With a long history of youth activism under her belt, she’s onto gentrification and Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s plan to develop Brooklyn.

“Basically, at one point I was reading Patrice Lumumba [a former Congolese anti-colonial leader], and it just came down to this…even if I am able to move these young people, if their parents don’t have a place to live, or an affordable place to live, then they won’t be able to live as healthy, conscious human beings. And so people have to start thinking about each other and their communities. They can’t wait for their government or someone in office to. They have to start taking care of each other.�

Here’s Tamar…

Globalization tends to have rather detrimental effects on the lives of women, especially working class women. Generally speaking, as women in developing countries increasingly work outside the home, (albiet often for low wages, inability to unionize and poor working conditions) we see a shift in the part that women play within the economy and culture.

According to this article, migrant women are sending more money home to their country of origin then men, thusly contributing more to the economy.

A recent United Nations Population Fund report shows that Gutierrez is not alone. Although female immigrants generally earn less than men, they tend to send home a larger portion of their earnings, playing an important role in poverty reduction and development in their countries of origin and upending many traditional mores.

According to the report, titled "A Passage to Hope: Women and International Migration," they send up to three-quarters of their income home, contributing substantially to the approximately $232 billion the World Bank estimates was transferred last year to immigrants' countries of origin.

The question is, is this really a good thing? Migrant women tend to be working in abusive conditions and are almost always underpaid. I mean it is great that they are able to work and send home money. But the deeper issue of why these women are so poorly treated and underpaid, remains unanswered.

via AP.

· “A college-educated woman with one child can easily pay a ‘Mommy tax’ (lost lifetime earnings) of $1 million.�

· “Consider that in the Army a family that makes below $28,000 annually pays no more than $43 per week for childcare, or around $2,000 annually. And then compare that to the national average cost of childcare, which can rise to $10,000 per year or more.�

· “In terms of infant mortality rates, the U.S. tied for 38th in the world with Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Arab Emirates in 2003.�

These are just some of the harsh realities Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner and Joan Blades researched and discuss in their book, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want—And What to Do About It.

I spoke with Kristin from her home in Kirkland, Washington. Here’s Kristin…

August 29 marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,700 people in the Gulf area and left hundreds and thousands of people displaced.

One year later in New Orleans: 17 percent of city buses are running; 54 percent of restaurants are still closed; 3 out of 9 hospitals with emergency rooms are open; and rent has jumped 39 percent.

In St. Bernard Parish, east of the ninth ward, 7 percent of public schools have reopened.

Jazz vocalist and pianist, Monica N. Dillon, was born in New Orleans and raised just outside the city in a town called Kenner and Metairie. I spoke to Monica on her way back to her home in Kenner, one day before the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Here’s Monica…

Winifred Breines is a sociology professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts (my alma mater;). I spoke with Winifred about her latest book, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. Winifred's research spans from the Civil Rights Movement through the 1970's women's movements, to 1980's activism and a brief look at third-wave feminism.

In addition to her research, Winifred personally partook in the new left, anti-Vietnam War, and women's movements in Madison, Wisconsin; Ithaca, New York; and Boston, Massachusetts.

Here’s Winifred…

Well, this sucks.

I posted a while back on the horrific law in Black Jack, St. Louis that prohibits more than three people from living together unless they are related by “blood, marriage or adoption.� While the town’s planning and zoning commission reviewed and then requested a change in the law, the measure was rejected on Tuesday by the city council in a 5-3 vote.

The mayor then declared that the city will be beginning to evict people who do not hold Black Jack’s definition of “family� this week.

The saddest part about the rejected measure is that it was only going to change the existing law slightly (but for a significant amount of people, I don’t doubt) to just include the definition of a family as “unmarried couples with two or more children.� Others still would’ve been out on their asses!

So I’ve decided that I’m leaving my home here in NYC to open a brothel in Black Jack, even if it’s just long enough to create some hysteria. Anyone in?

A Washington Post editorial calls attention to the fact that some members of Congress are using campaign funds pay for child care.

A leader in this creative billing is Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), who has had his campaign reelection committee and his leadership PAC pay $5,881 in child-care costs since 2001 for his daughter, now 14.

Doolittle has supported legislation to require more poor parents to participate in welfare-to-work programs without providing adequate increases in child-care assistance. He also received the lowest possible score from the Children's Defense Fund for his votes on (among other things) funding for child care, Head Start and after-school programs. Parents in his district spend one-third of their income on child care.

Maybe someone should send him a copy of the Motherhood Manifesto to inform him that not all working parents have a PAC to cover this expense.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons has lots to say about the Duke rape case. Based in Philadelphia, Penn, Aishah is the producer, writer, and director of the film NO! The Rape Documentary. She finished No! last August. Its world premiere was in February. And she’s been on tour with it ever since. She’s also the founder and president of AfroLez Productions, LLC, a multimedia arts company.

I spoke with Aishah on the phone in April, on a Friday morning. At that point in the case, there was no DNA evidence. But Friday, May 12th, the defense attorney for the accused Duke rapists, Joe Cheshire, said the semen obtained from vaginal swabs of the accuser indicates that she had sex with a man who is not a Duke student that night.

According to Cheshire, DNA was also found on a plastic press-on fingernail. The fingernail was taken from a trash can by two Duke players who rented the house where the rape is alleged to have occurred. The players were said to have volunteered the fingernail to the Durham, North Carolina police department after the players learned of the rape allegations. The genetic material found on the fingernail does not belong to either of the players who have been indicted.

I’ll withhold my comments.

I caught up with Aishah while she was in L.A., before another screening of No!. Here’s Aishah…

“Unwanted Pregnancies Rise for Poor Women.�

The National Center for Health Statistics among other sources led researchers to conclude that from 1994 to 2001, the rate of unplanned pregnancies increased by almost 30 percent for women below the poverty line. For women well above the line, the rate of unplanned pregnancies fell by 20 percent within that time.

When asked what they believed the drive was behind these trends,

“The authors noted that some state and federal reproductive health programs have been cut or made more restrictive in recent years. State and federal programs have increasingly focused on abstinence rather than contraception, and some analysts have argued that the shift is leading to less use of contraceptives and more unintended pregnancies.�

Leslee Unruh, the president and founder of The Abstinence Clearinghouse (self-explanatory title), says that the trends are due to the sudden and random failure of consistently effective sex education programs. She says, "They teach how to put on a condom rather than how to take control of their lives."

Because protecting yourself isn’t taking control of your life?

Now, I didn’t like Maureen Dowd’s NY Times Magazine article for a number of reasons: Dowd’s assumption (once again) that feminism ended in back in the day, the reliance on dubious studies, and--as Amanda points out--Dowd’s seeming penchant to blame everyone and everything but patriarchal norms.

But what really struck me about What's a Modern Girl to Do? is the extent of Dowd’s elitism. Determining a social trend based completely on the lives of the upper class isn’t exactly new, but I expected a bit more from an article on feminism. (Silly me.)

(Not to mention, Dowd’s insistence on measuring feminism’s success based on men and how women are faring in the romance department completely nullifies any truth there might be in the article. As I’ve said before, feminism isn’t a fucking dating service.)

Dowd’s reporting on the backlash against feminism and the “confusion between the sexes” relies almost exclusively on women within her social circles. Seriously--the people Dowd cites to make her case seem to be a bunch of her friends and acquaintances. (Mostly reporters, producers and a couple of actors.)

Other sources Dowd uses are just as class-based: the debunked New York Times piece on young women at Yale, a "60 Minutes" report that interviews women who went to Harvard Business School, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book that focuses on women who are corporate executives.

Really, is Dowd so egotistical to think that only certain “successful” women determine current gender relations? Perhaps if she expanded her circle of friends--or actually tried to interview the lowly secretaries, assistants, and nannies who are supposedly stealing up all of the men--Dowd would see that the future of feminism goes beyond her backyard.

UPDATE: Echidne's excellent take on the article.

Check out what our favorite socialist-feminist (don't know if she is still, but was back in the 70's and 80's) of the past has to say about contemporary corporate culture in her new book, Bait and Switch.

via Nerve...

In networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination," writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, her fantastically funny and important new book about the corporate world. An immersion journalist, Ehrenreich went undercover to land a job in public relations; in the process, she subjected herself to endless job coaching, resume shaping and image consultations. Ultimately, she never found actual employment, but she did take away a wealth of information about how American business culture has torn the social contract, and how playing it safe is no longer safe at all.

If anyone has read this or will read it and let us know how it is, that would rock. There is a short interview with her on Nerve, so check it if you are interested.

The Census Bureau reports that the nation’s poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year; there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.

Legal Momentum reported last year that women are 40 percent more likely to be poor than men in 2003. (If they come out with another study for the 2004 Census findings, we’ll let you know.) Ninety percent of adult welfare recipients are women.

Yeah, I know. I’m a downer.

According to a new study from Harvard Medical School, eating french fries as a child increases the risk of contracting breast cancer as an adult.

While the risk of getting breast cancer by the age of 60 is approximately 1 in 25, the research shows that eating french fries just once a week before the age of five would increase that to 1 in 20, a 27 percent increase in risk.

While potatoes are obviously not causing the risk, the preparation of fries -- frying in fat that’s high in saturated fats and trans-fatty acids -- are being considered as a factor. Ya think?

So on top of obesity and the unhealthy lifestyle that many low-income families endure due to environmental classism and racism, here’s another whopper to deal with: starve your kids or feed them cancer-causing food! Sigh.

You gots to love Women’s Entertainment. According to a recent poll conducted by the network, most women consider Paris Hilton to encompass all of the traits that an “American Princess” should have.

Hilton received 48 percent of the votes in the poll taken by 1,000 U.S. women, with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg as runner up. WE also (not embarrassingly) reported that when Hilton was told about her honorary title, she replied “That’s hot!” Could this be any sadder?

The answer is yes, for this royalty rage doesn’t end there. WE's new reality series, “American Princess,” has twenty young women compete to see who can become the most "regal" within a certain amount of time. With our apparent views on royalty, I wonder what that will include, perhaps Pornography and Prada 101?

Shopping sprees actually are included in the show, as well as a handfull of experts who will teach the girls how to behave like “proper ladies.” (Who knows what that will entail.) The reigning young lass will be given a British title, $50,000, and will get to wear a disgustingly expensive tiara for about ten minutes.

This reminds me of our previous post on young girls’ obsession with everything “princess.” What a fantastic new idol to dote on. Fuck Sleeping Beauty, Princess Paris is here! Sigh.

Check out the brief but good article from the Village Voice, "Where The Welfare Queens Went", a simple reminder of the failure of our current welfare reform system. Jarret Murphy writes:

"The people who left AFDC could be different from the folks who've recently enrolled in SSI or Food Stamps. And even if they are the same people, getting Food Stamps or SSI might be an improvement over receiving AFDC. But it doesn't seem like the 'self-sufficiency' the White House boasts about. It seems like welfare reform has done no better than welfare at curing the underlying problem, which, once upon a time, was called 'poverty.'"

Check out Women’s eNews’ article from Sunday on the discrimination and abuses that transgendered people and lesbians endure in homeless shelters. It looks into the reasons behind these occurrences and the failure of the shelter system to provide gender-appropriate services.

Although the Department of Homeless Services insists that they work hard to ensure that people are respectful, it looks like individual shelters don’t play by the rules, says Jay Toole. Toole is a shelter inspector with the Coalition for the Homeless in New York and a community organizer for the Queers for Economic Justice network.

In the past, Toole lived in shelters herself. In her shelters, beatings and rape of lesbians by guards and other workers were common and continue to occur. Lesbian couples also face the discrimination of various forms of proof of interdependency that are required in order to stay in the same shelter (forms of proof that are easily acquired by a married couple).

Transgendered women in particular are in shit because they're usually sent to men’s shelters, where they're raped and beaten as well. Toole says the men just see them as “girly men” that need toughening up. Much of the time they also have to comply with standards of the men’s shelters by dressing as men, and are not given access to gender-appropriate health services as well.

The total number of people who enter the NYC shelter system on any night is about 36,000, which is a 75% increase from 1998. On top of that, the number of women in the shelter system has nearly doubled from 5,200 to 10,000 over the last 6 years.

And this is in New York. I can only imagine what goes on in other cities.

FEMINISMS WITHOUT BORDERS: DECOLONIZING THEORY, PRACTICING SOLIDARITY
by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
(Duke University Press, January 2003)

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Feminisms Without Borders” is an exceptional analysis of various critical issues that exist within contemporary feminism. Of these, she uses three main themes to confront these issues: the decolonization of feminism, an anti-capitalist analysis, and the ultimate goal of solidarity. She discusses the conflict of globalization, reclaiming language, crossing boundaries between “third-world” and “first-world” women, and feminist mobilizing by using key concepts that helps the reader better understand the complexity of these issues. By the end of the book, Mohanty achieves in forming a very comprehensive and very possible solution to these conflicts that arise within feminist theories.

I highly recommend this book. Although the reading is pretty intense, it is an exceptional piece of writing that creates new meanings of mainstream concepts and terms. Her reclaiming of certain language is extremely productive and inspirational; it seems to look forward rather than focusing on the past. Her ability to use the theme of experience (which includes her own experiences) also made the book more insightful and seemed to bring her theories into life. The last chapter was particularly impressive because it gave the reader a solid and productive solution for these serious conflicts that exists among feminist practice. I think her greatest accomplishment is how Mohanty manages to discuss all of these complex issues and create a positive and constructive solution that doesn’t leave the reader with a question that so many theorists tend to do. Crossing borders doesn’t seem as impossible than it was before. That’s a big accomplishment.

According to a new report, women are 40 percent more likely to be poor than men. Gotta love good news…sigh.

Legal Momentum, a women’s legal rights organization, analyzed recent Census poverty data and found that almost one of every eight women is poor and that in 2003, 13.8 million women were poor.

"Clearly, to best fight poverty, we have to recognize that women are the majority of our nation's poor and tailor our solutions to women," said Legal Momentum President Kathy Rodgers, citing better access to child care, job training, education and domestic violence services.

Not likely to happen with Bushie still in office. What’s interesting is that given his repeated bullshit on education from last night’s debate, you would assume that Bush would push education as a solution to poverty (along with everything else under the sun…). But his record says otherwise; Bush thinks women need a man—not a job, education, or child care—to get out of poverty. His freaky-ass marriage promotion programs say it all.